


Dream Interrupted

by Lavendermagik



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M, POV Second Person, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Pre-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Reader-Insert
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-28
Updated: 2019-05-28
Packaged: 2020-03-26 07:05:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19000801
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lavendermagik/pseuds/Lavendermagik
Summary: Steve thought his recurring dream was simply a reminder of everything he had lost. But maybe that's not what it's telling him after all.





	Dream Interrupted

“The war's over Steve. We can go home.”

Steve had a vague impression of Peggy Carter in a hospital bed laying almost completely still, gray-haired and wrinkled, but that was impossible. Here she stood before him, young and vibrant and telling him he could go home. Home – it was all he'd wanted for so many years but knew he could never have. Why couldn’t he go home? People walked away from war all the time. Why was he so certain that he could never go back?

Peggy stood with her hand out, an invitation to dance. Why was he struggling to accept it?

“Oh, are you leaving?”

A new voice came from behind him. He turned to see you, but something was off. You didn’t quite fit here. The simple dress with its narrow skirt and padded shoulders, your curled hair, your lips a shade of red meant to inspire poetry – all of it looked just a little wrong somehow.

He hadn’t said anything, but you continued anyway, “I understand. I know how much it means to you.”

Your smile was at once both reassuring and sad. He wanted to answer you. He wanted to offer some kind of comfort. He hated seeing you upset, always had, from your teary eyes at the beginning of _Up_ to your resigned expression every time he told you he'd be gone for awhile. Why couldn’t he say anything?

“I want you to be happy.” You took a step back, and the world shimmered around you, like you'd step through a screen. The colors became muted, darker, shadowed, and you looked the way he'd last seen you. No more victory curls or bright lipstick. Your dress became a pair of jeans and a t-shirt from some event you’d attended. Your smile, though, that didn’t change – encouragement and regret twisting together at its corners even as they curled upwards. 

Peggy still stood beside him with her hand hanging in the air, unmoved and seemingly unaware of your presence, like a movie paused waiting for him to hit play again. Still her edges seemed to get almost too sharp as yours began to blur, whatever scene you were part of fading away into its own shadows. Your voice, however, was all-too-clear. “I'll miss you.”

“Wait!” he finally managed to say, reaching out his hand, not to Peggy but towards your retreating image. His next blink cleared out everything, and he saw his hand lifted to the ceiling of his current bedroom, tucked away in this week's safehouse. In an instant he knew that Natasha was awake in the next room. Wanda was further down the hall, but she didn’t struggle with insomnia the way the Black Widow did. Sam had gone out earlier, the least recognizable of them without his wings. 

The war was long over, and he was on the run for trying to do what he thought was right. And he'd had the dream again. The dream about Peggy that featured in his nightly rotation since Wanda planted it at the behest of a genocidal robot. Except this time it had taken a sharp left turn.

Steve reached for his phone and hit the speed dial automatically. Only after it rang twice did he wonder what time it was for you.

“Hello?”

“Hey, it's me,” he announced, and then as an afterthought, “Steve.”

“Are you okay?”

And that was it. No other preamble.

“Yeah, I’m fine. Everything's fine.” That was a lie. You would know that. The news of his desired arrest was pervasive. “I just… needed to hear your voice.”

It was a cheesy line, but he couldn’t help the truth. His dream clung to him like pond water, and he needed you to ground him in the present. 

“I’m glad to hear your voice, too.” You didn’t add because you were worried, but he knew. He wondered if you’d had to help take down his exhibit at The Smithsonian. That would have been hard for you. Unless it wasn’t… unless you'd seen the news and thought him as guilty as all those reporters did. Did you think his rightful place should be a jail cell? “Steve?”

He realized he hadn’t spoken for almost a minute. “Yeah, sorry, I’m here.”

“What’s wrong?” You didn’t sound like you were talking to a war criminal. You sounded caring and concerned. But you always sounded that way, whether you were chatting to a homeless man or comforting a child lost in the museum.

“I just realized I must have woken you up.” He'd finally done the math and calculated that you were living in the wee hours of the morning.

“You know I’ll always answer the phone for you.”

“Yeah.” He did know that, because it was what you’d always done, since you'd first recognized him at the Captain America exhibit you'd helped curate, despite his low profile and baseball cap. You hadn’t ratted him out but asked if there was anything he wanted a closer look at. Those private tours had turned into coffee turned into lunch turned into movie nights to help make his way through his list. You were easy to be with, never asking too much or expecting anything more from him. He'd wondered once or twice if you were waiting for him to make a move, to push your relationship in a romantic direction. But you never seemed impatient or discouraged. You were just happy spending time with him.

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I’m fine. I just miss… everything.” He scrubbed at his face wearily, trying to wipe away the exhaustion and discontentment.

“Everything misses you, too.”

He wondered if by ‘everything' you meant yourself. He wondered if he'd meant you as well.

“How are you? How is everything…” At home? That sounded too familiar, too much like something he didn’t have a right to anymore. “…with you?”

“It's okay. They’ve got me working on a new exhibit now that's pretty interesting. It's all about ancient Greek gods.”

“I don’t know any Greek gods, but I have a Norse god I could introduce you to.” His chest tightened the moment the words were out. He'd never brought up introducing you to the others. You had become his best kept secret. He just wanted one thing that being Captain America couldn’t take away from him, something that belonged solely to Steve Rogers. In the end, even you hadn’t been sacred, relegated to clandestine phone calls on an untraceable line.

But you laughed, far too brightly for having been woken up so early. “What does one even wear to meet a god?”

“Anything probably. I don’t think Thor would care one way or the other.”

“Sometimes I forget that the Captain America on TV who hangs out with gods and superheroes is the same guy who burned my grilled cheese because he didn’t realize how quickly an electric stove would heat up.”

And that was the most beautiful thing, wasn’t it? That you could forget. That you could see him as an average guy with less than stellar cooking skills.

“Give me a break – I wasn't much of a chef when all we had was gas. It was the first time I ever cooked for you. I thought grilled cheese was something I could handle.”

“It was delicious. At least the second attempt was. And you more than made up for it with that soup thing the next time.”

That had been a deliberate choice. Soup was harder to mess up.

“Don’t act like you didn’t put me to shame with your pancakes and bacon. What did you call that?”

“Brinner – breakfast for dinner. And that was a total cop out because breakfast food is ridiculously easy.”

Everything with you was easy. So easy he wondered if he might have taken you for granted.

“Can I… can I ask you something?” He hated that he had stuttered. That made his question sound awkward and weighty. Which it was, but he didn’t mean to give that away so soon.

Still, all you said was, “Of course.”

“All those dinners… and the movies and the coffee… were any of those… did you think…” He was struggling, and he knew you could tell. But you and your inexplicable patience waited quietly while he got his words in the right order. “Were those dates?”

The silence made him wonder if the call had dropped, but then he heard you take a deep breath. “Do you want them to be?”

That seemed unfair. He’d asked you first. But then, it wasn’t very fair to put the entire burden of defining your relationship on you either.

“No, I don’t think so,” he finally decided, then hurried to continue, worried that you might be getting the wrong impression. “When I take you out I don’t want you to have any doubts that you’re on a date.”

He probably shouldn’t have said when. That was presumptuous. This conversation was extremely difficult when he couldn’t see your face.

“That settles that then.” Your voice didn’t sound put out – just gentle and affectionate and a little tinny from the phone’s poor speaker quality.

“Would you say yes? If I asked you on a real date?”

“I think that would require us to be in the same time zone.” You were teasing him, which was familiar and comforting but also so stressful given the current situation. He must have paused too long in his anxiety, because your next words had an apologetic quality. “Steve, I would have gone out with you that first day in the museum if you’d asked. But I wanted you to want it, too.”

He couldn’t remember if he’d wanted it or not back then. He had been trying to figure out working for SHIELD and still reeling over finding Peggy in the nursing home, which somehow felt like losing her all over again. You had been an unexpected but welcome surprise, and he’d never questioned what more could be, never thought to push past the simplicity you offered in his world that was nowhere near simple. Now, when it was all he could think of, he wished he hadn’t wasted so much time. He had no guarantee that he would ever be back in the same time zone again. He might very well have made the same mistake a second time and missed yet another date. He really was an idiot.

“Steve?”

But he couldn’t say that to you. He couldn’t say it out loud at all and quash the tiny spark of hope that someday everything would work out. He wanted to ask you to wait for him at the same time he berated himself for continuing to ruin your life. Even this phone call would cause you trouble, could possible pull you closer to the danger that followed him like a half-starved, rabid dog. You could become collateral damage, all because he was weak and foolish and just wanted one good, solid thing in his life.

“I should let you get back to sleep.”

“You don’t have to. I don’t mind.” You didn’t miss a beat, even with the dangling thread of conversation. 

“Maybe not, but I don’t want to be the reason you're dead on your feet tomorrow.”

“As far as I’m concerned, this is the only acceptable reason for losing sleep.”

You were so good. He should have realized how much he wanted this sooner.

“Even so, you have a job and a life. I… probably won’t be in touch again for awhile. No one should be able to trace this call – this number won’t show up on any of your records. It's some kind of technology we picked up.”

A beat of silence passed where he imagined you were realizing that this meant you wouldn’t have access to his number either. “Oh.”

“It's safer this way.”

“I understand.”

He wondered if you really did. If you knew just how much he would suffer if anything ever happened to you, especially if he was the cause.

“I probably shouldn’t have called. It was reckless of me.”

“What's life without a little reckless abandon? I don’t think I’m in any imminent danger, but I'll be extra careful for the next few days.”

“That's my girl.”

You didn’t say anything immediately, and he wondered if he'd overstepped his bounds. But then you said quietly, “Come home soon, okay?”

If he could. If anything was left when he did. If for once in his entire life he found a way not to be on the losing side of time. Because he didn’t want to give up on this dream reimagined, no matter how irresponsible the want of it might be.

In the end all he could offer was, “I'll try.”

“Be safe.”

“You, too.”

His first thought after hanging up was to go back to sleep, but he dismissed it immediately. Instead he turned on the bedside lamp and took out one of his few spurious possessions. He flipped open to an empty page, which most unfortunately were due to his many responsibilities, and began to sketch the version of you from his dream, all tight curls and sensible heels. Next to it he drew the you he was most familiar with, clothed in t-shirts and jeans but with a smile that made everything you wore look like high fashion. 

He'd decided that he was no longer allowed to want things for himself. Once he'd wanted a life with Peggy, one where they won the war and would live happily ever after. But the ice had ripped that dream away from him, left him thinking his time for dreaming had passed. Now he could feel that self-imposed restriction shaking, straining at its bonds, fighting to break loose. His dreams now were simpler in comparison. He just wanted one real date with you. If that went well, he hoped you would agree to another. Maybe all the dates would pile up, would form a relationship, would form a life. 

He ran his thumb over the curve of your 1940’s jaw, smudging a shadow. It was a pretty picture, but all it proved was you looked good in any decade. His old life was over, but he could accept that because this ending was leading to a new beginning – a beginning with you. He just had to hold onto the hope that someday he could get back to it.


End file.
